The
Men In Black is now a motion picture experience, but eyewitness
accounts of these shadowy figures have been documented for 50 years, and
they have become as integral to UFO lore as the Philadelphia
Experiment, Roswell,
Area 51
and crop circles. Aptly described as "sartorial agents of
silence", they are believed to move in groups of two or three. They
wear black suits and ties, travel in similarly coloured Cadillac's and
turn up at the houses of those who claim to have seen UFOs. They will warn
these witnesses not to pursue their. investigations.

They may confiscate any
"evidence" that the "contacted might have collected. They
seem to have telepathic powers, they are uncannily well informed, and give
the impression that they work for the government - although US
intelligence agencies have denied all knowledge of them. They are born of
the same kind of paranoia that underpins sightings of flying saucers and
claims of extraterrestrial abduction. The most common post Roswell
stories are victims losing several hours of their lives, oftcll after
witnessing a blinding light, and for years afterwards suffering recurring
nightmares about being experimented on by aliens.

Just as the stories of
abductions and close encounters are remarkably alike, so the stories
arriving from different corners of the world about The Men In Black are
uniform in content. And they go back almost as far as the first recorded
UFO sighting, in 1947, when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted a group
of shimmering discs hovering over Mount Rainier in Washington. Almost
immediately afterwards came the "Maury Island Incident" in which
a man named Harold Dahl claimed he had seen some flying doughnut-shaped
objects, one of which had dropped a lump of metal on his dog's head. Dahl
said he had then had breakfast with a stranger wearing a black suit who
drove a 1947 Buick Sedan and warned him to keep silent. The Maury Island
Incident was later reported to be a hoax. Genuine or otherwise, this
didn't deter The Men In Black, who pursued a tight schedule for the next
50 years. Albert K Bender, for instance, director of a research group
entitled the International Flying Saucer Bureau, abruptly announced his
retirement following a visit by three men with eyes that shone like
flashbulbs. "If we hear another word from your of fine, you're in
trouble," they warned him. Several years later, in 1968, Bender
published a book in which he explained The Men In Black in more detail:
they were, he claimed, from somewhere called Kazik; he had visited their
spaceship in Antarctica; they had told him that their agents had
infiltrated the Pentagon.

In 1971, UFO author
Timothy Green Beckley published a pamphlet entitled MIB - Aliens Among us,
in which he revealed a US Air Force memorandum apparently written by one
Lt Gen Wheless. It warned military personnel to be on the alert for people
impersonating air force of fixers, describing a person in a USAF uniform
who "approached local police and other citizens who had sighted a
UFO". Apparently, this shadowy figure assembled them and told them
that they had not seen what they thought they had seen. Nor should they
talk to anyone about their imagined sighting. As would be expected,
sightings of The Men In Black were documented throughout the Sixties and
Seventies when the fashionable nihilism spawned by the Vietnam war,
nuclear threat and the arms race gradually mutated into academic
orthodoxy. In an atmosphere dominated by Cold War paranoia, assassinations
and Watergate, every conspiracy theory gained validity. One of the most
interesting and most detailed descriptions of a Man In Black was given in
1976. Dr Herbert Hopkins, a psychiatrist based in Maine, had no previous
link with this field, except that he had been treating a youth who claimed
to have been abducted by aliens. Here is an abbreviated account of the
whole episode, as Hopkins told it to UFO Review:

"I was alone in the
house. The telephone rang and the voice on the other end identified itself
as a member of a New Jersey UFO research organization. I agreed that he
could talk with me about the abduction case. He said that he would be
right over. I walked from the telephone in the hallway to turn on a light
and the man was already coming up the stairs. If he was as close as across
the street, or even next door, he couldn't have possibly gotten here so
soon. "His attire struck me as a little odd. He wore a neatly
tailored black suit, black shoes, black socks, and a black tie. He also
wore a black Derby. I thought, 'God, this man looks like an undertaker.'
"We sat down and I said to myself, 'This character is as bald as an
egg.' He didn't have any eyebrows or eyelashes and his skin was a dead
white colour. His nose was very small and it came down to just above the
upper lip. His lips were ruby red. "He had the appearance of a
clothing store dummy. His sump looked as if it had never been worn before.
He spoke flawlessly English with no accent, completely neuter, like you
would get from a machine that could talk."He was wearing gloves. They
looked like grey suede. He 5 brushed his lips with the glove, and when he
put his hand downy the back of his glove was bright red. I said to myself;
'This guy is wearing lipstick.' Then I could see that his mouth was
perfectly straight. He did not have what we call lips, so the lipstick was
there as some sort of decoy. "He could apparently read my mind. He
told me I had two coins in my left pocket, which I happened to know for a
fact. "He asked me to hold a bright new copper penny up in my
fingers, and he made it disappear in a bright blue light. I didn't smell
or feel anything. I was just fascinated at that point. "I got a
little uneasy when he ordered me to destroy the tapes and any other
correspondence and anything to do with UFOs. He said that if I didn't do
so I would suffer the same fate as Barney Hill" [a renowned
'contactee who had died under mysterious circumstances]. "I truly
believe that this individual was from another planet. He is not an
invader. I don't think so anyway. But I do feel he, and others like him,
are around, nosing about..."

The nature of these
visitations has changed little in the past ten years, and stories still
abound about peculiar interrogations conducted by men who, rather scarily,
look like Bryan Ferry. In 1985, a report emerged from Venezuela in which
two doctors claimed that they had seen two men wearing black suits and
shades emerge from a magenta Ford Mustang and then climb up a ladder into
a UFO. Nine years later, Mike Lonzo, a researcher n Pennsylvania, visited
an old woman who told him that she had been approached by two individuals
wearing black dinner jackets. They demanded she give them a black stone
that was in her back Fyard because it had the power to destroy the world.
She complied. Then they asked her out to dinner in a restaurant in
Pittsburgh. Testis urzu, testis rullis. Everyone from Hawking to
Asimov has had their say. We have been offered humanoids and reptoids,
angel hair and hoaxes, interdimensional gateways and autopsies. The result
is a virtual truth, so out there no one knows what is real. Eyewitness
accounts of abductions and interplanetary travel have been
indistinguishable from the parallel universe presented by screen writers
from The Day The Earth Stood Still in 1950. In 2001A Spare Odyssey, an
astronaut is transformed into a hybrid that is half man, half alien - a
fantastic idea you may think, and one that could only exist in science
fiction. But in America, Jenny Randles has published Star Children -
"the stories of people who believe they are the offspring of aliens
and humans". The Men in Black, chic and scary, are still an
unexplained phenomenon. Psychiatrists may throw out phrases such as
"fantasy prone personalities", "disassociative
states", and "constructive perception"; debunkers will do
their work and describe rational causes; but no one has pinned down The
Men In Black and, consequently, disparate suppositions have been spawned
in this arena of strange perceptions.

Theorists who affiliate
UFOs not so much with outer space as with the paranormal suggest that The
MIB are a form of demonic psychic energy similar to the poltergeist. Some
have said that The Men in Black were linked to a branch of the US Air
Force Special Activities Centre known as the 1127th Field Activities
Group, which was said to comprise a group of underworld figures who were
specialists in lock-picking and intimidation. Others argue that The Men in
Black were Tibetan monks who followed the Dalai Lama and the Khamba riders
into exile, and placed their yogic powers at the service of the CIA. This
could help to explain why many reports of MIB describe their features as
Asian. John Keel, a leading UFO investigator, has pointed out that,
"a large proportion of the available UFO literature is based on
hearsay and speculation. Many of the real and important problems have been
suppressed at the source by the witnesses themselves or have been ignored
by superficial investigations which concentrate on obtaining descriptions
of the objects rather than studying all the events and factors surrounding
the sightings.

"Many of the aspects
which have preoccupied UFOlogists for years have proved to be misleading
or have failed to contribute to a better understanding of the whole. The
UFOs represent only a small part of a much larger phenomenon which is now
occurring on a worldwide scale. By being more thorough and objective in
our investigations we can - and will - learn more about the main
phenomenon itself." But objectivity holds little sway in a land where
meta-logic makes faith and pseudo-science gives rise to all manner of
extraterrestrial hypotheses. You could put it all down to protean psychoid
phenomena. Or you could simply agree that everyone loves a good story.